Businesses can have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of servers or other computer systems that run applications that are used to operate the business. These servers can be grouped regionally, by applications that they run, by line of business, by groups within the line of business, etc. Employees within the business are tasked with managing the configurations of the servers or groups of servers, which includes reviewing, updating, and validating that the server settings are configured in the way that they are intended to be configured, and that they stay properly configured over time.
Unwanted changes to the configuration settings of the servers or applications that run on the servers can occur over time. The configuration setting changes can occur through human error, software updates, computer errors, unauthorized access, software code errors, hardware failure, data corruption, policy enforcement or lack thereof, etc. For example, most server service pack updates include notes regarding the configuration settings that are affected by the service pack, but they often affect other configuration settings without the knowledge of the support teams charged with uploading the service packs or the vendors that provide the service packs. Server configuration settings are also affected by active group policy changes or individual user changes without the knowledge of the support teams that are tasked with managing the servers.
The servers and applications running on the servers can have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, etc. of associated configuration settings. Therefore, when two servers or groups of servers need to be set up with the same or similar configurations the only way to set the configurations is to set up both systems and hope that no mistakes were made. There is no way to check that the initial set up or following updates to the configuration settings were made correctly, and that the configuration settings are maintained over time. Moreover, there is no way to know what all the configuration settings are at any given point in time, without viewing thousands of configuration settings on a line by line basis. The only way support teams become aware of configuration setting issues is if the applications or systems used by the businesses are not functioning properly, in which case valuable time is lost during the application and system outages while the support team tries to identify the system or application issues and fix them.
There are challenges in being able to quickly identify the configuration settings of servers and the associated applications and how they change over time. Therefore, there is a need for apparatuses and methods for effectively allowing the support team to monitor, update, validate, and maintain the configuration settings for specific servers and groups of servers within the business.